Merchants that operate network-accessible marketplaces may maintain electronic catalogs that include thousands of items (or more) offered for sale. These electronic catalogs often include item detail pages accessible through one or more networks (e.g., web pages accessible over the Internet). These item detail pages often include descriptive information (e.g., text descriptions, pictures or video) in order to assist a buyer in determining whether an item is worth purchasing. The merchant may index this descriptive information in order to expose search functionality to customers. For instance, a customer may enter one or more keywords into search component provided by the merchant, such as a search box or widget on the merchant's website. The merchant may process the query and provide one or more search results to the customer. Typically, the quality of these search results will be dependant at least in part on the quality of the customer's search query. For instance, vague or short queries may result in a quantity of search results that is too large to be helpful to the user. Similarly, overly specific queries may result in too few search results.
Furthermore, identifying features of different products may be useful for categorizing and/or searching for items. While merchants may receive some general information and/or marketing information about items from item suppliers (or other sources, such as manufacturers), this information may in many cases fail to explicitly enumerate the relevant features of the items. As feature sets may vary widely among different product types, evaluating this information to identifying these features is not an insignificant undertaking in some cases, particularly for large electronic catalogs with information for many different items.
While the system and method for providing query recommendations based on search activity of a user base is described herein by way of example for several embodiments and illustrative drawings, those skilled in the art will recognize that the system and method for providing query recommendations based on search activity of a user base is not limited to the embodiments or drawings described. It should be understood, that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit the system and method for providing query recommendations based on search activity of a user base to the particular form disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope of the system and method for providing query recommendations based on search activity of a user base as defined by the appended claims. The headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and are not meant to be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. As used throughout this application, the word “may” is used in a permissive sense (i.e., meaning having the potential to), rather than the mandatory sense (i.e., meaning must). Similarly, the words “include,” “including,” and “includes” mean including, but not limited to.